Monthly Archives: May 2019

Children’s Biennale @ National Gallery

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I was invited to the Opening of the Children’s Biennale at the National Gallery today. My anxious mind of course required a two-day preparation for this, but I had been looking forward to it since the invitation arrived in my email’s Inbox. The build up was, of course, a gradual crescendo at first, and then a rapid stretto build up as the event drew nigh. Anxiety + hypersenses + attention to detail all jumbled together. Creating order from chaos is part of the reason behind all the careful planning that precedes every single occasion.

The National Gallery has now become my favourite art space in Singapore. I love old historical buildings, and this one is a grand one. There are many small little quiet nooks dotted around the huge expanse that one can duck into for some respite, if things get too overwhelming. There are some inaccessible spaces that wheelchair users would be unable to reach, unfortunately, due to the nature of the building, but they’ve done their best to make the exhibits as accessible as possible. I am truly bowled over by the National Gallery’s efforts towards access and inclusion, something I’ve not experienced to this extent in Singapore before. Lucy is welcome in this space, and they treated us like royalty the first time we came (which was a tad over the top, but I deeply appreciate the care they took of us, a stark contrast to always being stopped at the door with many a gruff, “NO DOG ALLOWED!”), but I left Lucy at home today because she wasn’t feeling very well.

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neurodivergent world

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Clement Space @ Playeum 2019 – Dawn-joy Leong

Seems as if I’ve been involved in quite a few “firsts” in Singapore lately. The most recent was the very first Autism/Neurodivergent-Led, Disabled-Led Art & Design residency, which was support by the National Library’s library@orchard branch, and yesterday saw the soft opening of Singapore’s first Neurodivergent immersive and interactive space – crafted by two autistic artists and two artists with Down syndrome, curated by Esther Joosa and Imran Mohamed for Playeum, a centre for children to discover creativity in multiple ways. Continue reading →

Uniquely Me Episode 1 – a perspective

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The first episode of “Uniquely Me” – a series about autism and autistic lives in Singapore – aired last night on MediaCorp’s Chinese Channel 8. Immediately afterwards, there were rumblings and rants emerging from the adult autistic community in chat groups and on Facebook.

Background

Some contextual background is needed before I launch into my own perspectives and reactions to this twenty minute show.

Autistic people – we are an oppressed and traumatised, vulnerable and hurting community worldwide. As autistics, we are already predisposed towards hypersensitivity, detail orientation, and communicate with the world in ways unlike the normative. Add to this the accumulated collective cultural history of Autism (see Steve Silberman’s “Neurotribes” – the best book published thus far on the history of autism), and the specific situation here in Singapore, where the perception of autism as a whole is mired in the old medical model, and autistic people are generally presumed incompetent rather than competent, completely devoid of our own voice / voices: we have thus acquired a collective trauma, and individual heightened anxiety around the subject of Selfhood. The setting is a painfully raw, tender, largely confused and ignorant, and emotionally volatile scenario. It is not surprising, then, that many in the adult autistic community have reacted explosively, with anger and shock, at this very stark presentation of autistic persons with complex needs in the first episode. Continue reading →